This application claims the benefit, under 35 U.S.C. §365 of International Application PCT/US2004/007653, filed Mar. 12, 2004, which was published in accordance with PCT Article 21(2) on Feb. 3, 2005 in English.
Downloading service systems having a triangular model consisting of a content requester, a content server, and a content consumer have been proposed. In such systems, content requests typically at one location pass to a content server for delivery to another location where the content consumer is. One of the problems with the prior art systems is that they do not provide session transfer so that a session established between the content requester and the content server is not easily transferred to the content consumer. Another problem with the prior art systems is that they do not allow efficient selection of the content consumer to which the requested file is to be downloaded. Prior triangular models require a business relationship between the local access network and the remote access network, which is often not practical, which therefore prevents use of such models.